Whatever the truth of it, the charge that Bush's war plan may have put the explosives in the hands of Iraqi insurgents or other "enemies" plainly has the White House on the defensive. Terrorism and Iraq are supposed to be Bush's turf in this campaign, and the polls continue to reflect that Bush has an edge over Kerry on those issues. But in debates and on the stump, Kerry is strongest when he prosecutes Bush for his handling of the Iraq war. The polls reflect that, too. Despite the fact that voters say they trust Bush to do a better job in Iraq, they also seem to like Kerry more when he's on the offensive about it. Kerry stopped his summer slide when he amped up his war critique in September, and his dominating performance in the first debate, the one focused exclusively on foreign policy and national security, brought Kerry back into a dead heat with the president. It was the third debate, the one that focused on the domestic policy issues where Kerry is supposed to be stronger, that allowed Bush to stop his own slide.

So it was that on Tuesday morning in Wisconsin, a state that has lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the last four years, Kerry delivered a speech that focused almost exclusively on the war in Iraq and what he said was the president's lack of candor about it. "When the president is faced with the consequences of his own wrong decisions, he doesn't confront them, he tried to hide from them," Kerry said. "The truth is, the president has never leveled with the American people about why we went to war, how the war is going, or what he is doing to put Iraq on track."

As his comments suggest, Kerry is now questioning publicly, if a little obliquely, whether Bush's stated reasons for going to war were actually the ones that drove his decision. Kerry contrasted the administration's decision to protect oil fields rather than the munitions supplies in Iraq, with the fact that the United States "allegedly" -- and he stressed the word -- went to war to keep weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists.

Kerry will continue to hit Bush on both the war and the economy as he campaigns this week in Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota and Florida. The pivot point in his stump speech -- the moment where he switches from the war to the economy -- has become one of its most important moments. "We need a president who can do two things at the same time," Kerry says. It's a dig at Bush's agenda but also his intellect, and Kerry's crowds love it.

Kerry still has those Kerry moments on the campaign trail, particularly at late-night rallies when his voice grows a little raspy and his exhaustion begins to show. Just before midnight in Green Bay Monday -- a day that began at dawn in New Hampshire -- Kerry stumbled over his words a few times, and his speech lost the blunt crispness that it has in his better hours. But the night seems to bring out something else in Kerry, too -- a rising sense of anger built on disbelief that Bush has handled the war in the way he has. Maybe Kerry always feels that way. Late at night, he actually shows it.

And at all the stops, Kerry is making his charge just a little more personally. Monday night in Green Bay, Kerry turned the knife on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a man whose firing Kerry had advocated for months. After explaining the horrors that 380 tons of explosives could bring, Kerry reminded his supporters of Rumsfeld's infamous "stuff happens" remark from 2003 downplaying post-invasion looting in Iraq. Pantomiming a "whaddya gonna do about it?" shrug, Kerry said of the missing munitions, "Well, looting happens."

It isn't the only imitation Kerry tries on the stump. In his stump speech now, Kerry slumps his lanky frame over the lectern in a spot-on re-creation of the president at the first debate, and he says, over and over again, "It's hard work, it's hard work." He says he's ready, and, in an awkward Kerry embellishment, "impatient," to "relieve the president of that hard work."

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